Thursday, January 22, 2015

candy box mailart

What would you do if your sweet or savory snacks came in small, colorful, artsy paper boxes like these? Would you eat the treats inside and throw out the box? Of course not!

You could display them on your bookshelf, or make practical use of them for collecting loose buttons and paper clips. But I like to turn them into mail art.

Notice the little purple box (6.5 cm x 4.5 cm; 1 3/4" x 2 1/2 "). It once contained a soft chewy sweet made from purple yams, and it has an etegami-style illustration of purple yams on the cover.

I converted it into a pop-up Valentine box card by recycling old Christmas cards to decorate the inside. I used a snowflake hole puncher to make holes in the black backside of one Christmas card, and cut the pink hearts out by hand from the colorful front side of another. It still needs words, which I'll add before I send it.

You've probably done something like this before. Maybe you'd like to do an exchange?

A Beginner's Guide to Etegami

what is etegami?

Etegami (e= "picture"; tegami= "letter/message") are simple drawings accompanied by a few apt words. They are usually done on postcards so that they can be easily mailed off to one's friends. Though etegami has few hard-and-fast rules, traditional tools and materials include writing brushes, sumi ink, blocks of water-soluble, mineral-based pigments called gansai, and washi postcards that have varying degrees of "bleed." They often depict some ordinary item from everyday life, especially items that bring a particular season to mind.